Thursday morning should have been election day. Instead, it became the morning Ponda was told to go home. Hours before polling was to begin for the Ponda Assembly by-election, the High Court of Bombay at Goa issued an order cancelling the polls — catching voters, candidates, and even the government entirely off guard. At least one voter had already made his way to the polling booth at Khandepar before the news reached him; he turned around and went home. Across Ponda, the mood followed suit. The constituency has been without an MLA since October 15 last year, when the sitting legislator passed away.
After nearly five months of waiting — and weeks of an intense campaign that had energised even first-time voters — the prospect of finally having a representative had felt close enough to touch. On Wednes day, it evaporated.“Many voters, including first-time voters, were enthu siastic about participating in the democratic process but now feel let down,” said Vishal Fadte, a voter from Ponda. The sense of deflation on the ground was palpable, com pounded by the awareness that the constituency will now remain unrepresented for another 10 to 11 months until the general Assembly elections. Those elections had meant more than just a vote to many residents. Ponda’s civic grievances run deep: the Ponda Sub-District Hospital is woefully under-equipped, and the town — a taluka headquarters serving people from four constituencies — is strangled by a parking crisis that sends vehicles spilling onto roadsides daily.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
The by-election had been the moment to demand answers. That moment is now gone. So, too, is the money spent getting there. The entire electoral machinery had been mobilised — booths set up, personnel deployed, logistics put in place — before being stood down at the eleventh hour. The question of who foots the bill, and who should be held responsible, is now at the centre of public anger. “The expenditure incurred on election machinery should be recovered from those responsible for the cancellation,” Fadte said. “In a democracy, the people are supreme and should not suffer due to administrative failures.” He did not mince his words in describing what had occurred — a “serious injustice” in which both taxpayers’ money and candidates’ hard-spent campaign funds had been wasted. The blame has landed most heavily on the Election Com mission of India, which critics say was aware of relevant High Court judgments and chose not to act on them. For mer Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, Ferdino Re bello, was blunt. “It was entirely the fault of the Election Commission of India, willingly or unwillingly. It knew that judgments had been passed by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court. These judgments were not challenged, and the ECI accepted them.
So the ECI must be held respon sible,” said Justice Rebello. NCP (Sharad Pawar faction) president Jose Philip D’Sou za echoed the point, noting that by failing to challenge those rulings, the ECI had allowed them to become final. “The political parties that fielded candidates should now file appeals so that a definitive ruling can be obtained from the Court,” he added. If the ECI drew most of the ire, opposition parties added their own political charge to the morning’s developments. Kushavati District Congress president Rajesh Verekar al leged a conspiracy: “The ruling BJP conspired with the ECI to get the Ponda by-election cancelled,” he said, claiming the party moved only after sensing defeat. His candidate, Ketan Bhatikar, and Congress workers had run what he de scribed as a robust campaign, only to be left “disheartened”. All India Trinamool Congress national spokesperson Tra jano D’Mello was equally critical, arguing that the ECI had been “working in tandem with the double-engine sarkar,” fully aware of the High Court’s position yet deliberately in active.
However, he also reserved some of his sharpest crit icism for the Congress and AAP, whose silence during the court proceedings, he said, amounted to complicity. Parties that had not filed intervention petitions, D’Mello argued, had little ground to hold press conferences now. The BJP, meanwhile, said it too was blindsided. Power Minister Sudin Dhavalikar said nobody had anticipated the cancellation and that the government had been unaware of the Nagpur bench’s verdict — a claim that has done little to quieten critics. WRD Minister Subhash Shirodkar struck a more optimistic note, saying: “Ritesh Naik will definitely become MLA in the next election in 2027. He will have to wait for another eight months.” Eight months, on top of the five already gone. For Ponda, that is the cold arithmetic of Wednesday’s anti-climax — an empty booth, an empty seat, and a constituency left to wonder when, and whether, democratic due process will finally be allowed to run its course
